An Albanian terrorist caught with bomb-making equipment in his cellar was an
illegal immigrant who was given a mortgage by NatWest it has emerged.

Krenar Lusha was in the middle of downloading a video showing how to make a suicide vest when police raided his home, in August last year.

He had bomb making equipment in his home including 14 mobile phones and a video on his laptop called “mobile detonators” that showed how to turn the phones into a bomb trigger.

He also had a video on his computer that included diagrams showing how to blow up petrol with a shotgun cartridge and 71.8 litres (15.8 gallons) of petrol in his cellar along with two kilogrammes (4.4 lbs) of potassium nitrate, one of the ingredients of gunpowder, in his bedroom.

At Preston Crown Court today he was sentenced to seven years in jail but it also emerged that Lusha, 30, who had failed to get asylum in the UK, applied to the National Westminster Bank for a mortgage in his real name and was given a 25 year loan without putting down a deposit.

He bought a £93,000 Victorian terraced property in the Normanton area of Derby, last year in the middle of the financuial crisis and also was also given a British driving licence and a £30,000 engineering job at a plastics factory.

When bank staff were asked about its dealings with Lusha, one mortgage advisor told the court: "He was just a pleasant natured person and there was nothing untoward."

Sentencing him to concurrent seven-year sentences for each of five guilty verdicts, Mr Justice Butterfield warned Lusha he would be returned to Albania after his sentence.

The judge added: "To the outside world you were the cheerful, hard-working helpful man whose only interest was to build a better life for yourself and find a Muslim bride, but behind that facade, in my judgment, there was a much darker side to you, a side that positively revelled in violence, death and destruction.”

Lusha had joined chat rooms in which he boasted to girls that he was a “terrorist” and a “sniper” and how he “loved” to see Jews and Americans killed Preston Crown Court heard.

He was asleep in bed when police raided his home in Derby on August 26 last year but a laptop was connected to the internet and material was visibly being downloaded.

Det Chief Supt Tony Porter, of the North West Counter Terrorism Unit, said: "While there is absolutely no indication of what he intended to do with these items, I believe he had the intention of committing an extremely serious offence - I cannot possibly speculate on when or where.

Lusha had become radicalised whilst studying Islam and Arabic in Qatar as a youth and smuggled himself into the UK on the back of a lorry in January 2000, arriving undetected at Dover.

Nigel Godsmark QC, prosecuting, said Lusha had downloaded instructional films on how to make detonators, explosives, a missile and a suicide bomber belt.

A total of three computers were found in his home and police discovered gruesome footage on the hard drives of live beheadings by extreme Islamic groups.

There were also a number of video clips by groups fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya that included exerts of US military vehicles and personnel being blown up and of US soldiers being shot.

A Nat West spokesman said: "It would be inappropriate for NatWest to comment on the specifics of this case, however the Bank has robust mortgage account opening procedures in place."